The Politics Of The Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have Civil Rights?

An abridged version of this article first appeared in the
October 1984 issue of TheAtlantic Monthly as the
cover story “The Politics of the Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have
Civil Rights?” It is republished here, in its entirety, for the
first time.

For anyone with insomnia in the New York metro area, the ads have
become ubiquitous: three middle-aged men dressed in cornflower blue
lab coats, holding mysterious technical equipment, and offering the
owners of haunted houses (or haunted anything, really) their unique
ghost capture and removal services.

I first saw one after falling asleep to the dulcet drawl of
Charles Rose on “CBS News Nightwatch.” The spot feels like a parody
of those local commercials starring used car salesman and “crazy”
warehouse owners. It ends with the team pointing their fingers at
the camera, like Uncle Sam in an army recruitment poster, and
shouting flatly over the din of passing traffic, “We’re ready to
believe you!”

You may know of these men already. They’re the Ghostbusters.

Until the beginning of the current fall semester—when Columbia
University abruptly shuttered its psychology department’s program
in paranormal studies—Dr. Egon Spengler, Dr. Ray Stantz and Dr.
Peter Venkman had been conducting research into extra-sensory
perception and recurring manifestations of what they call vaporous
apparitions and psychokinetic activity. “Psychics, ghosts, floating
stuff, to the lay person. But to us it’s way more technical,” Dr.
Venkman explains, half ignoring me as he rifles through the bottom
drawer of a filing cabinet, then fixing me with a cold stare.
“Stuff floats for a lot of different reasons.”

Our original cover, from October
1984.

“Dr. Spengler and Dr. Stantz are the only people I’ve seen who
have taken all these parallel dimensions proposed by Bosonic String
Theory and Superstring Theory, and are attempting to correlate them
to supernatural events,” says Freeman Dyson, a theoretical
physicist and mathematician at Princeton. “They’re the only ones
actually gathering hard data on subatomic behavior during these
unexplained occurrences—at the Ivy League-level anyway.” Notorious
among colleagues for his contrarian streak, Dyson has avidly
followed Dr. Stantz and Dr. Spengler’s articles in the journal of
London’s Society for Psychical Research. It is outré reading
material for a winner of both the prestigious Max Planck medal and
the Harvey Prize, but Dyson is effusive in his praise for Stantz
and Spengler’s felicitously documented case studies.

“[But] that third name doesn’t sound familiar to me,” he
says.

It was Dr. Venkman, in fact, who lead the charge to commodify
the trio’s academic research into a for-profit enterprise, talking
Stantz into mortgaging his family home to purchase a headquarters
for their business in lower Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood. In
just a few short months, the Ghostbusters have since rocketed to
prominence, following a string of alleged successes in what they
call the “reclamation of paranormal phenomena.” Clients, judging
from press reports, have included a business at Rockefeller Plaza,
a restaurant in Chinatown, the fashionable Manhattan night club The
Rose, and their first widely publicized case at the five-star
Sedgewick hotel.

Their service began to garner national attention almost
immediately after the Sedgewick episode, with features on the
Ghostbusters appearing in USA Today, Time magazine and a
segment on Larry King’s late-night talk radio show on Mutual
Broadcasting. Last month, they serendipitously acquired their own
theme song, “Ghostbusters,” a Billboard-charting R&B single by
Ray Parker Jr., whose previous hit “The Other Woman,”
coincidentally, also had supernatural elements. Occasionally, when
the song is playing, the Ghostbusters will walk with a peculiar
strut that looks bound to hyperextend their knees or trip
passers-by.

The Ghostbusters’ more infamous
appearances in the New York Post. (Credit: Front pages for
the October 11th and October 16th, 1984 editions reproduced
courtesy of News Corp.)

Lately, this media attention feels like it’s sliding into mass
hysteria, having already triggered a spike in ghostly sightings and
haunted house cases across the country—and, as an obvious
corollary, plenty of business for the Ghostbusters. But locally in
New York their fame seems more qualified, occupying a liminal space
between hometown heroes and objects of popular ridicule. Nowhere
was that ambiguity more on display than earlier this month, when
Venkman and Stantz appeared on “Beyond Reality,” a paranormal
call-in show on Manhattan’s public access channel J, answering
questions live over the phone and from the undead via Ouija board.
Venkman, in particular, came off as ready to take the format into
prime time. He sparred with crank callers—latter day Harry Houdinis
looking to debunk the Ghostbusters’ televised séance—frequently
insinuating their employment in various menial, degrading jobs
while reminding them that his own labors let them work those jobs
in peace.

“Did anyone have a grandmother named Iris?” Venkman asked the
audience at one point, while manning the Ouija board with the
show’s host. “She says you need to eat something.”

It was hard to tell if Dr. Stantz was being equally glib with me
when I brought up this television appearance later. “I think it’s
good for us to engage the public on Occult topics, but I recognize
it’s an uphill battle,” he said. “Deservedly so, even. There’s
every practical reason why Western Civilization has been
stigmatizing this kind of esoteric knowledge for millennia: It’s
immensely powerful, nasty stuff. Dangerous. Unpredictable.”

Having now pored over several out-of-print books on medieval
demonology and mysticism on loan from Dr. Stantz, I’m still unsure
how someone with advanced degrees in both psychology and physics
could seriously entertain such a baroque spiritual cosmology.
America has, of course, a long history in the thrall of
pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious movements, from the
Spiritualists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to today’s
Scientologists and infomercial televangelists. Are the Ghostbusters
merely just the next wave? Or are they simply con-artists
capitalizing on the moral panic created by the increasingly
influential evangelical Christian movement, with its shrill
warnings on the dangers of demonic possession, satanism and the
always imminent “end of days”?

For their part, Stantz, Spengler and Venkman all refused to
comment for this article on their rather lucrative involvement with
both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the McMartin Preschool
“satanic ritual abuse” trial. They were also equally silent when I
asked them about a National Enquirer piece that claims
Ghostbusters International had received payments via White House
discretionary funds through First Lady Nancy Reagan and her alleged
personal astrologer, Joan Quigley.

“I wouldn’t call them hucksters from my personal experience,”
says Dana Barrett, a cellist with the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra. “I don’t know. It’s just sometimes hard to believe they
were former college professors and not just former students.”

Barrett garnered some press attention after The New York
Post learned that she had been the spectral reclamation
firm’s first customer. (Barrett declined to elaborate on the nature
of the supernatural occurrence in her apartment, but her neighbor
Louis Tully told the Post that it was possibly a
misunderstanding, given that “Dana leaves her television on a lot
by mistake and, you know, it makes a lot of funny noises. There’s
been complaints, but I don’t mind, personally. Dana’s great.”) The
Post had a field day with claims that Dr. Venkman was
ostensibly attempting to flaunt his credentials as the chairman of
the Ghostbusters, “the largest paranormal investigation and removal
company in America,” as a pretext to spending the night with
Barrett in her apartment. Barrett has refused to comment on the
Post story, but says she has retained the Ghostbusters’
services until her case is resolved.

It’s perhaps no shock given the firm’s ivory tower-pedigree, but
coverage of the Ghostbusters in the Post has been remarkably
adversarial, beginning with an early exposé on the negative aspects
of the Sedgewick hotel incident. The ghost catchers had arrived at
the Sedgewick at the climax of a bizarre, two week-long alleged
haunting that was costing thousands in room service receipts,
according to the hotel’s manager. Multiple patrons, the manager
claims, had complained of a goblin-like apparition eating their
food. A police report filed without charges by the hotel, but
unearthed by the Post, stated that the Ghostbusters had
destroyed a chandelier and much of the the Sedgewick’s main
ballroom just minutes before it was scheduled to host the Eastside
Theater Guild’s annual “Midnight Buffet.” Employees of the firm
additionally scorched a stretch of wall down a twelfth floor
hallway, according to the report, and nearly killed a member of the
hotel’s housekeeping staff, evidently mistaking her sheet-draped
cleaning cart for a ghost.

“They left me there trying to put out flaming toilet paper with
a bottle of Windex,” said the maid, who asked not to be mentioned
by name. “They said they were sorry, but didn’t try to help, at
all. [They] nearly killed me! I think they’re assholes, to be blunt
with you.”

The Sedgewick reportedly absolved the Ghostbusters of all
responsibility for the property damage and the charges of reckless
endangerment—as well as paying them a total of $5,000 for what many
would consider the dubious service of removing a “focused,
non-terminal repeating phantasm or a class 5 full-roaming vapor”
(i.e. the food goblin).

Some clients, however, have been less charitable. Ghostbusters
International, Inc. is currently listed as the defendant in one
civil and two criminal cases in the tri-state area.

The first was a kidnapping charge brought by the descendants of
two young women who had been tried for witchcraft in colonial
Brookhaven and whose avenging spirits were now purportedly
terrorizing teens at a Christian Youth Ministry overnight in Glen
Cove, Long Island. The case was thrown out of Nassau County’s Tenth
District Court when the victims’ 319-year-old death certificates
were produced at a pre-trial hearing by Dr. Spengler, who for
financial reasons has been acting as the firm’s legal counsel
himself.

“Egon is a real Renaissance man and very dedicated to
Ghostsbusting,” says the firm’s executive assistant Janine Melnitz.
“And I think that’s very admirable, even though it doesn’t leave
him much time for more personal, recreational activities.”

The second case pending against the firm, The State of New
Jersey vs. Ghostbusters International, Inc., et. al., concerns a
roughly 2,700-acre forest fire that the company is accused of
starting in Wharton State Forrest while attempting to capture a
legend of local folklore, the Jersey Devil, in the Pine Barrens
National Reserve. Their client, prominent naval architect and owner
of the New Jersey Devils hockey franchise John McMullen, is also
listed as a defendant in the criminal complaint, which is scheduled
to go to trial this February.

“My anticipation was that covering this trial would be a return
to a region and a people that I’d come to love two decades ago,”
says John McPhee who wrote about the arraignment in last month’s
issue of The New Yorker. “Instead, it’s turned out to be a
whipsaw return to the ghastly moral calculus of nuclear research,
which I examined in my book on Theodore Taylor [The Curve of
Binding Energy]. These Ghostbusters have essentially been
operating cyclotrons—high-powered, particle accelerators—out in
public with zero government oversight. Now, we know some of the
risk factors here, because proton therapy has been a viable form of
cancer treatment for decades, but no one, not even today’s leading
lights in quantum mechanics, have practical experience with proton
stream behavior at these flowrates.”

After the Glen Cove “witch” incident, McPhee says he spoke to
physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory who voiced concerns
about Stantz and Spengler’s “proton pack” ghost catching
technology. They likened the accidental intersection of these
particle beams to operating a nuclear collider, or an “atom
smasher,” out in the open air—multiplying the concerns that already
swirl around this kind of high-energy particle collision research.
In a telephone interview, Edward Witten of Princeton’s Institute
for Advanced Study confirmed McPhee’s anxieties saying that the
theoretical basis exists for at least two doomsday scenarios: “Case
1. The Ghostbusters could accidentally create a microscopic, but
stable, black hole that might begin accreting matter very rapidly,
until Earth and its celestial neighbors were swallowed whole; or
Case 2. The Ghostbusters could accidentally produce a bound state
of quarks called a strangelet, which arguably could lead to a
runaway fusion reaction reducing the planet to a large, smoldering
orb of strange matter or a quark star. In either case, it would be
pretty bad.”

From left to right, consumer rights
advocate Ralph Nader and Ghostbusters International co-founders Dr.
Egon Spengler and Dr. Peter Venkman at a September 6th, 1984
hearing of the New York State Assembly’s Special Committee on
Nuclear Safety. (Credit: Jeremy Ladd for the Albany Times
Union)

When I broached this topic with Dr. Spengler, he said that while
the Ghostbusters don’t normally discuss their proprietary
technology with the press, they can say that SOP training has been
implemented internally to mitigate the stream-crossing issue. He
cited the firm’s voluntary appearance at the New York State
Assembly’s Special Committee on Nuclear Safety in Albany this past
September where details emerged of an independent audit on their
facilities, conducted by Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s consumer
advocacy group.

“I voted for [Libertarian candidate] Ed Clark in the last
presidential election and have had zero interest in voting either
before or since,” Dr. Spengler told me as we sampled a
chickpea-based Lebanese dish that Nader had left in the
Ghostbusters’ office. “So it’s safe to say that Ralph Nader and I
do not share much common ground, though I do respect his lack of
sentimentality.”

The third and potentially most costly litigation facing the
company is a class-action suit being pursued under the Clean Air
Act by the Environmental Protection Agency. It began when guests
situated above the Sedgewick Hotel’s main ballroom began
complaining of a chlorine smell and a pale blue gas. According to
the EPA’s lead investigator in the case, Walter Peck, there is
considerable evidence from the Sedgewick and several others sites
that the Ghostbusters’ spectral removal process generates ozone
(O3)—a toxic ingredient in photochemical smog known to cause severe
respiratory damage—at levels well above the limits set by the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Peck says the
ozone-levels are of particular concern for clients in
well-insulated spaces with low ceilings.

“It’s a ridiculous accusation,” Dr. Stantz says. “Any
astrophysicist will tell you that proton streams from solar storms
will routinely dissolve parts of the ozone layer. The whole reason
our technology works is that these spectral manifestations are
comprised of a negatively charged plasma. We are not causing these
ozone levels, okay?”

“What Ray’s telling you is true,” Dr. Venkman added. “The ghosts
are making the ozone.”

I made sure to broach this issue with Walter Peck in a follow-up
interview. I also asked him what he thought was the legality of a
private firm detaining someone’s immortal soul—particularly the
souls of U.S. citizens as in the Brookhaven witch case—but he
refused to entertain either of these ideas even as
hypotheticals.

“I’d rather not dignify this confidence game the Ghostbusters
call a business plan by openly discussing whether undead ghosts and
goblins ought to have due process under the law,” Pecks says. “I
don’t for a minute believe in these campfire horror stories, but
irregardless [sic] the spectre of above-threshold ozone
toxicity is very real. The basic fact is that three discredited
academics are now out there, pointing dangerous, high-powered
equipment at every creaking door and drafty window in New England.
We need regulation and we need oversight.”

“Frankly, there’s no accepted case law on the undead at the
moment,” Dr. Spengler added, “but taking into account the
inter-dimensional nature of these entities, I would argue that this
is largely an immigration issue or a contraband issue depending on
the sentience. Technically, INS should be deporting spirits of the
deceased, as well as the other apparitions, the demons. We
submitted a contract proposal, actually, but they haven’t
responded.”

When this topic arose, I finally summoned the courage to ask the
Ghostbusters about their containment unit, which Stantz, Spengler
and Venkman led me downstairs to see. The ultimate spooky basement,
the bottom floor of the firm’s TriBeCa headquaters is an
ever-increasing summation of every other haunted basement in the
world. Behind a phalanx of cautionary industrial signage, a
red-painted steel casing, and an energy-intensive magnetic field,
lies every spook, specter, apparition, ghoul and ghost captured by
the Ghostbusters. Again: allegedly. Listening to the unnerving hum
of the containment unit, I asked again about the ethical dimensions
of corralling these seemingly conscious beings indefinitely within
the company’s high-tech purgatory.

“We all feel kinda bad about the Sedgwick slimer,” Stantz told
me. “After some of the hauntings we’ve witnessed in the past month,
there’s definitely something endearing about a ghost whose only
crime is maniacally pigging out.”

“He also smelled like onions,” according to Venkman. “I’m not
letting him out of there.”

Few law scholars were willing to speak to me about the
hypothetical legal issues of ghost entrapment.

Thomas Shaffer, who taught estate law at Notre Dame for 12
years, suggested I contact the Diocese of Rome’s resident exorcist
Gabriele Amorth, but the priest declined an interview. One
outspoken champion of Dr. Egon Spengler’s extradition and
deportation analogies, however, horror fiction writer Stephen King,
says he has spoken to Justice Department lawyers and others who
were willing to support Dr. Spengler’s legal arguments.

Horror author Stephen King, second from
left, in 1985, the year after this article’s initial publication,
dons a pair of official “ghost hunting” coveralls while trailing
the Ghostbusters team. (Credit: Janine Melnitz, Ghostbusters
International, Inc.)

“To a person, they’re all Reagan appointees or generally
conservative in their interpretation of the law. One is a Lutheran
and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court,” King said. “But
they’ve all told me, off the record, that they could see this
‘inter-dimensional foreigner’ interpretation holding up, if a case
were ever to go to trial, which frankly doesn’t seem likely.
Personally, I think the argument would especially hold up in the
Jersey Devil Pine Barrens incident or with a poltergeist—anything
that’s not a former citizen and also possessing someone or causing
physical damage is clearly engaged in a criminal act itself.”

King just recently signed a six-figure book deal, his first
major foray into nonfiction writing, to chronicle the
Ghostbusters’s exploits for Simon & Schuster’s Free Press
imprint. Slated for release next September, King’s book, The
Dehaunters, is being marketed as the first in a new genre:
supernatural true crime.

“I’ve always envied those ride-alongs that crime fiction writers
do with local law enforcement,” King told me. “This is my first
time doing this kind of intensive procedural research for a book.
It’s exciting. I’m still wrapping my head around some of the
physics, but it’s been incredibly exciting. There’s something
perfect about this business operating out of an old firehouse, with
this pole and everything. I think we’ll live to see Ghostbusting as
a genuine municipal utility.”

“I think Ray is the only one who’s genuinely happy that King is
here all the time,” Spengler confided in me.

“It’s not that he isn’t a nice guy,” Venkman says. “It’s just
that he’s way, way too excited. Sometimes, though, it’s nice
that Ray has someone to talk about 14th Century Romanian magicians
with—and he’s good at playing Star Gazer,” a pinball game on the
building’s second floor.

Though King’s will be the first book to market, publishers are
clearly banking on an increased demand for anything and everything
Ghostbusters. John McPhee says he was contacted by pulp novelist
Richard Bachmann, author of The Running Man and the upcoming
supernatural thriller Thinner, about co-authoring a
competing nonfiction project for the New American Library’s Mentor
imprint. Tentatively titled Negative Beings, the book
differentiates itself from King’s by focusing on the technical
innovations behind the company’s flashy spook hunting.

“Bachmann is a strong science fiction writer and I’m a strong
science writer. So, the hope is that we’ll be the first to resolve,
for a popular audience, some of these outstanding questions about
what the Ghostbusters do,” says McPhee who confided that he has not
yet met Bachmann, but has been impressed by his written
correspondence. “I can’t seem to get him on the phone, but I can
tell Bachmann’s taking this seriously. I don’t want to stoke some
literary feud with a top-selling phenomenon like Stephen King, but
I think we’ll be making a valuable contribution with this second
book.”

McPhee laughed off my questions about the ethics of
Ghostbusting. “Who are you going to call? A lawyer?”

Cliches like “legal gray area” fail to adequately describe the
terrain the Ghostbusters find themselves navigating, far out on the
fringes of quantum physics and spiritual mysticism (ostensibly),
and operating technology no one seems to understand. They’re off
the charts—either wildly past the point of illegality, inventing
new crimes and committing weird combinations of old crimes at a
staggering pace, or positioned well beyond mere civic virtue at
some superheroic point we may have to call sainthood.

It’s cold comfort given these stakes, but according to Bill
Lauren, who is publishing an exclusive on the Ghostbusters’s proton
packs for Omni, the team is at least routinely grappling
with these thorny moral dilemmas in their downtime, even
considering new ethical dimensions their critics have yet to
broach: accidentally transporting clients to parallel dimensions,
permanently ripping the fabric of space-time, catalyzing something
called a “full protonic reversal” that they refuse to elaborate on
and that no scientist I’ve spoken to has ever heard of.

“Just sitting in on the casual watercooler banter between them
has been enough to give me nightmares,” Lauren confided to me. “You
should ask Egon about the current Twinkie-to-Twinkie ratio.”

Around the office the Twinkie ratio has become sort of a gallows
humor shorthand for assessing the increasing volume of
“psychokinetic” (i.e. ghostly) activity in the New York-area, as
compared to static levels. According to Dr. Spengler, the ratio is
currently a Twinkie the size of a school bus. And it’s growing. The
company is looking to hire and train new personnel to meet demand,
but worry that they may have to start making some concessions to
their own ideals.

“Up until now, we’ve been reticent to patent our technology
simply because most of it has some disconcerting alternative uses,”
Dr. Spengler says. “Dr. Stantz and I have already turned down two
no-bid contract offers from the Department of Defense for strategic
defense initiative research and some kind of death ray. We’ve felt
that keeping our hardware proprietary for as long as possible was a
great way to avoid regulatory overhead and keep the technology out
of the wrong hands. But there’s a limit to the security we can
afford to maintain that secrecy. And—especially if the Twinkie
keeps getting bigger—we may have to form some sort of partnership
with a state or federal bureaucracy.”

“That all being said, we are incredibly patriotic,”
Venkman interjects. “Don’t forget to write that down. No one,
nobody, loves this country more than the Ghostbusters.”

Oh, geez. Matthew Phelan
has previously written things for The Onion,Inside Climate
News, and Chemical Engineering magazine. (The
cartoons and Photoshops were also by the author, fwiw.)He would
like to thank two particle physics researchers, Dr. Peter Yamin at
the Brookhaven National Lab and Prof. Sunil Somalwar at Rutgers,
for reviewing this piece in advance. Obviously, though, if there is
a mistake in the writing up there, somewhere, that isn’t just
clearly made-up Ghostbusters stuff, then it is entirely and
exclusively Matthew Phelan’s fault. Also, literally all of you
should know that Prof. Somalwar helps run a nonprofit called
Saving Wild Tigers that
wouldn’t say no to donations; nor would the New Jersey chapter of the
Sierra Club, where he is vice-treasurer.